Q&A with Alternate Reality Games Director Elan Lee

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Q&A with Alternate Reality Games Director Elan Lee

Elan Lee

Q&A with Alternate Reality Games Director Elan Lee

In the realm of alternate reality games, few are more knowledgeable than Elan Lee. A mere seven years ago, he and fellow videogame designer Jordan Weisman concocted the ARG genre over lunch in a sushi shop. The premise—a game that used the physical world as a playscape—was implemented in 2001 with the launch of the first alternate reality game, The Beast, which promoted Steven Spielberg’s *A.I. * Lee quit his videogame gig to create ARGs full time and has now directed three projects at 42 Entertainment.- Mary Jane Irwin

Wired: What is your attraction to the alternate reality game medium?

Elan Lee: I want to make you a superhero. That’s my goal. You get to be that secret agent, that superhero, that celebrity, that person who possesses skill above mortal man that you’ve always kind of suspected you had. [The game] is going to let you actually show off those superpowers … and reward you for it and entertain you for it, and do it in a way that you can’t help but experience because your life is the entertainment platform.

Wired: How exactly do you come up with an alternate reality game?

Lee: We spend a lot of time playing the “What if?” game. What if when you woke up in the morning none of your friends remembered your name, and your car only drove in reverse, and you got strange mail from a stranger telling you to meet him on a street corner because he has a briefcase that you absolutely have to get.

In the case of I Love Bees (an ARG promoting Microsoft’s Halo 2), all my life I have answered randomly ringing pay phones. It might be someone who urgently needs to talk to me. I am that superhero. So I remember starting at that point and brainstorming with the guys at 42. We played the “What if?” game—what if you answered that pay phone and someone actually did want to talk to you? From there it snowballed into a six-hour radio drama ultimately delivered over randomly ringing pay phones around the world.

Wired: Are you ever concerned a task or puzzle will be too difficult?

Lee: When we were creating The Beast, we had that exact question. How do we scale this thing? How do we make sure that nothing is too hard? We had this great plan: On the first day, we’ll have all these really hard puzzles—there’s no way anybody’s going to be able to solve them. At the end of the week, we’ll release all the same puzzles but make them way easier. They’ll be clued differently, and they’ll be much less obscure. Most people will be able to solve them by then. And a week after that, for the people who still haven’t quite gotten there yet, we’ll release a really, really easy version of the puzzle that everyone can solve.

We had this 15-day roll-out plan. Day one comes, and we release the hardest version of the puzzles. Within two hours, every single puzzle we had thought up was solved.

We learned two very important lessons here. One: This is not a single-player game. We are dealing with a large community, and collectively they are smarter than any of us. We should not try to match wits with them. And the second: There really is no such thing as a puzzle that is too hard. But you have to treat that very carefully because there absolutely is such a thing as a puzzle that is not fun. We want to make sure no matter what the insane thing we’re asking you to do is, you’re always having fun while you’re doing it.

Wired: What is the biggest design challenge you face?

Lee: On a meta level, the biggest problem we have to tackle is beating ourselves. Every time we start a project it has got to be better than every previous project. When we succeed we always sort of slap ourselves and say, “Oh man, now we’ve got to beat that one, too.”

Wired: With ARGs so dependent on community, how do you ensure one exists to support your game?

Lee: Any time we start a new campaign we look for two things, and you need to have at least one or the other, but ideally both. One is a network, and two is a story. Whenever we start we do that query. Does a network exist? Does a story exist? Whichever one doesn’t exist, we create.

In the case of Halo, where there’s a great story and a community really excited about that story, what we had to do was create a network. That’s what pay phones were. Any time you have both a network and a story you have the potential to deliver a compelling breakthrough experience.

But when we have the opposite scenario ... what we try very hard to do is create the most compelling story possible within that framework. Microsoft Vista was a great example of this in which we created the Vanishing Point. Microsoft has an amazing network. It has access to TV spots and Web sites, and it has this massive community. But it’s an operating system. There’s no story there. We have to activate the community so that it’ll feel inspired to use the existing network to find bits and pieces of the story, to reassemble them and to share them with everyone.

Wired: What’s the most surprising thing you’ve seen from a community?

Lee: When we were doing I Love Bees, we had all these theories that these guys were talking to one another and were really well connected. We ran this crazy test on one of the last days of the contest. We picked a random pay phone somewhere in the United States and [called] it. We had our actress, a live actress who would talk to whomever picked up the phone, and she would say, “OK, I’m going to call another phone somewhere in the United States in five seconds, and I want them to tell me the password I just told you.” Five seconds [later] we would call another phone, and they would know the password. It was crazy. How many other jobs are out there where you can discover this multibrained organism that is willing to play with you all day?

Wired: In ARGs audiences can influence the game while it’s unfolding. How quickly are you able to react to community opinion?

Lee: That’s one of the cool things about ARGs. They operate on the 80/20 model. We have 80 percent of the content ready to go when we start. But we leave a good chunk at the end to give us the ability to react to the players. When they really like a character, we can give that character a larger role. When they really hate a certain type of interaction, we can downgrade that type of interaction.

In the case of a Web site, we can turn something around in a matter of hours. In the case of live actors and phone calls that need to go out, that can take place in a day or two. We always try to make room for that level of reaction.

Wired: Most ARG players are rather connected individuals. What does the genre need to do to include those who aren’t constantly connected to a network?

Lee: Anytime we design a game, we always have this [inverted] user pyramid in mind. It’s cut up into three sections. The large broad part at the top is the very, very casual player. These are the guys we’re not going to rely on for having cell phones; we’re not going to rely on them being connected; we’re not even going to rely on them to know where the community is. But there are more of them than anyone else. So we try to make sure that there’s at least some easy way into every game we create—a two- to 10-minute experience that is rewarding and fun, and that will hopefully encourage you to come back.

The middle part of that triangle is not nearly as populated as the top. They’re pretty well connected. They’re probably not going to shy away from calling a phone number if they see one. They probably have email access, and they probably at least know where a community lives—whether or not they choose to engage with that community. We tend to assume that they won’t. Those guys are going to maybe check in every week, every two weeks. We try to make sure they have plenty to do whenever they want to experience it.

And then the very tip of the triangle. Those are the crazy guys—the hardcore guys. Those are the ones answering pay phones, going to live events, hosting chats, and really participating at the very lowest level of the game and really know the story very well. And the cool thing about this pyramid is there’s a really lovely side effect where the bottom parts entertain the top parts. The casual guys get to experience not only our cool story and our cool interactions but also the hardcore guys experiencing it. They get to read all these posts about going out in the middle of the night to answer pay phones or meet strangers to exchange briefcases. And that’s just as entertaining. That’s like reality TV right there. It’s a really fun player model. But in order for any one of our experiences to be successful, we have to have some mechanism to allow all three of those kinds of players.

Wired: What will it take for ARGs to be a stand-alone form of entertainment – more than a really intense marketing campaign?

Lee: We’re anxiously looking for that line. We all really want these things to become huge, and ultimately we want them to be their own story. Earlier I spoke about every one of these things needing a network and a story. The goal, the holy grail of all of this, is to create a product that supplies both of these things for itself.

This is a genre in its infancy. If you used an airplane metaphor, we’ve got a little thing with wings and it has floated off the ground. That’s a huge success. We’re really, really excited about that. We all have this dream of what actual flight would look like. We’re in a unique situation where we get to try a bunch of things, learn from our successes, and learn from our mistakes. Every time we build one, it’s better than the last one.